. . . the planet and life itself will survive . . .
How are you defining “life itself”?
. . . and probably even be better off without humans.
I’d say that goes without saying.
Humans are causing the next extinction event and afterwards life will just start fresh again.
Start “fresh”? Like with single-celled organisms? Maybe a billion years later we’ll be back eating sandwiches? Okay, so what process created sustainable environments again? Humans left some sort-of-permanent damage. Nuclear waste, PFAS, etc. Sure a good ol’ pole shift and a few asteroid impacts and we’re back in business.
So no, saving the planet is not the goal. Saving humanity and most of all other current life is. And if that’s what you want to accomplish then that’s what you should talk about, specifically.
God this is fucking exhausting. The prevention of unmitigated and prolonged suffering by all sentient life is the goal, YES. Kudos to the possibly viable future space rock and the wisdom to acknowledge our utter inability to protect one single planet from ourselves is laughably inadequate and - CLEARLY - irrelevant.
IMO, it is a distinction that is worthwhile. The universe is not anthropocentric. It doesn’t give two shits about humanity (it’s not, to our knowledge even sentient). Humanity is completely insignificant to nearly anything but humans. To me, it puts into perspective that noone and nothing in this indifferent universe is coming to save us from ourselves. It’s up to us.
Life will continue without us, just like it did before us. If the entirety of the world’s nuclear arsenals are used, there’s a good chance that microbes like Deinococus radiodurans will survive to evolve into new forms of complex life. The human species is far more fragile than the planet.
IMO, it is a distinction that is worthwhile.
What distinction, pointing out that the existing astronomical and mineralogical structures will withstand even our worst impulses? Or changing “Saving the planet” to “slowing our inevitable dissolution due to corrupt thinking and possibly saving some ducks, too”?
The distinction is already very well known - as we can see, people drive for hundreds of miles so they can hop out and tell us the actual physical structure of Earth will remain, most likely. It’s the insistence on focusing on that distinction which slows our ability to talk about the core causes for this climate disaster. And it sounds a lot like the previous 100 years of:
- there’s plenty of nature
- we can’t live like savages, we must pollute to make money
- what if we add lead to it and spray it all over everything and everyone? No knocks! Profit!
- What the heck is an ozone layer
- oh you’re a tree hugger huh
- there’s no proof its caused by humans
- there are always periods of heating and cooling
- this is a Chinese hoax
- well you drink water so you’re part of the problem
- i’ll never give up eating meat, what are you, gay?
- It’s too expensive to not destroy the environment
- oil prices are the key to liberty and freedom
- the future of clean energy is a nightmare because we’ll have to enslave humanity to extract rare minerals from protected wildlife areas to build large batteries
- it’s fine, the earth will survive. Sure we’ll die and everything we commonly consider animal life will be killed but - ya gotta go sometime
Now you’re just lobbing together people who want to distinguish what exactly it is that needs saving with climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists and antivaxxers. Seems to me you just like boxes, really big boxes, in which to put in all the thing you dislike/disagree with or whatever.
You don’t care that I disagree with almost everything on your list except for 2 things that I think are really important to be specific about.
- “Saving the planet”, which I’ve explained
- ”You drink water, so you’re part of the problem”, which is kind of true if you extrapolate and include it in your decision on if to have children.
Be my guest, I don’t care enough to continue this conversation beyond this point with a hammer that’s just looking for nails.
If the entirety of the world’s nuclear arsenals are used, there’s a good chance that microbes like Deinococus radiodurans will survive into new forms of complex life.
Y’all acting like this happening isn’t a literal catastrophe. You guys are all insane.
